Da Hong Pao's Closest Relative Is a Green Tea

Four caddies arrive in one box. Da Hong Pao, Tieluohan, Baijiguan, Shuijingui: the 四大名枞, the Four Famous Bushes of the Wuyi cliffs, sold as a set and tasted as a set. A novice reasonably reads that as a family portrait. The chloroplast record reads it as four plants that happen to share a mountain.

What was sequenced, and what it showed

In 2022 a team led by Li published the complete chloroplast genomes of five classical Wuyi cultivars in Mitochondrial DNA Part B¹: Baijiguan, Rougui, Shuijingui, Tieluohan, and Bantianyao. Three of those five sit inside the famous four. Two do not. Rougui and Bantianyao are separately celebrated Wuyi plants that never entered the canonical set, and the study handled all five as one working group of mountain cultivars.

Placed on a phylogenetic tree against other Camellia sinensis var. sinensis cultivars, the Wuyi plants did not gather. In the authors' own words, they "did not cluster together, but intermingled with other C. sinensis var. sinensis varieties, reflecting the rich genetic diversity of Wuyi tea varieties." The paper reads that scattering as early divergence: these lineages parted company far back, and whatever has held them on one shelf since is not recent common ancestry.

Da Hong Pao was sequenced on its own, in a 2021 paper from the same journal², and on a much wider tree: 37 Camellia species across two subgenera, built to place Da Hong Pao against the whole genus, not to re-test it against its own Wuyi neighbors. None of its three box-mates sat on that tree at all, so this is not a rematch of the famous four; it is a different, larger question, and it has its own answer. What the tree does show, plainly, is which branch Da Hong Pao's own lineage sits nearest to: not any oolong, but C. sinensis cv. Longjing, the green-tea cultivar of Zhejiang, a few hundred miles up the coast, fixed green and unoxidized, never partly oxidized, never touched by charcoal. Two separate studies, two separate trees, pointing the same direction: whatever unites the Four Famous Bushes on the shelf, the chloroplast record does not show it.

One thread of the lineage, not the whole vine

A chloroplast genome is inherited down the maternal line in tea. These two papers trace one thread of ancestry, the mother's, and the finding must be stated at exactly that width. All of these plants are Camellia sinensis; no species boundary is in play, and nothing here rules out shared ancestry further back than the maternal line can show. The claim the data supports is narrower and more useful: followed through the mother's line, the famous bushes stand apart from one another, and from the tidy grouping their packaging implies.

A roster that will not hold still

The grouping itself has never settled. In 1943 the tea scholar Lin Fuquan named five representative Wuyi cultivars, and the Chinese Tea Cultivar Compendium formalized that five-bush set in 2001 as the "Five Traditional and Precious Wuyi Bushes." Rooteas.com's own current account³ of that history goes further: it reports that Da Hong Pao's fame has since grown large enough that some scholars and tea professionals treat it as a category of its own, apart from the rest, leaving Tieluohan, Baijiguan, Bantianyao, and Shuijingui as that account's "Four Famous Bushes," with Da Hong Pao dropped out and Bantianyao added in. That is a different four than the set on the caddy label. Two authorities, writing about the same mountain, cannot agree on who belongs in the family photo.

Their origin stories carry the same disagreement. Tieluohan's has a monk at Huiyuan Temple finding a pale-branched, cotton-budded tree in a cliff crevice, named for his own strength. Baijiguan's has a farmer burying a rooster, killed by a snake on the climb up, beneath a tea bush, after which the bush's leaves paled from deep green toward a near-white that brews a soft yellow liquor. Shuijingui's has a monk spotting rain-soaked shoots that resembled a golden turtle crouched at a crack in the rock, the bush's spreading branches read afterward as its shell. Da Hong Pao is not even told alongside them: rooteas.com's own history³ sets it apart precisely because its fame outgrew the others, and the fullest account of its own legend is left to other keepers to tell. Three separate stories for the three lesser-known bushes, in three separate registers, and the loudest name in the room does not even appear in the same telling as the rest.

The Chinese-language record dates them apart as well. 福建茶叶网⁴ states plainly that "铁罗汉是四大名枞里成名最早的，在宋代贡茶里就有铁罗汉," Tieluohan is the earliest to become famous among the Four Famous Bushes, already appearing in Song-dynasty tribute-tea records, and describes Da Hong Pao's legend as carrying Buddhist cultural coloring, "大红袍蕴涵着佛家文化色彩." A Song tribute ledger and a legend colored by temple religion are the paperwork of two different fames, filed under one modern label that neither of them wrote.

What the four do share

The pedigree fails; the place and the craft do not. All four grow in the Wuyi cliff terrain, on the weathered rock and thin ravine soil that the Chinese trade grades by proximity to the core zone before it grades anything else. All four are worked through the same sequence: withering, the shaking that drives partial oxidation, and then charcoal roasting, applied and re-applied over weeks until the fire is set into the leaf. All four answer to the same gongfu discipline, a small vessel, near-boiling water, short infusions poured off cleanly, built to be taken deep rather than drained in one cup.

That is a real kinship, and a drinker can verify it without a sequencer. It is also the kinship the 2022 study quietly assumed when it put Rougui and Bantianyao in the same sample set as three of the famous four: on the mountain, the working category has always been the rock and the roast, not the family tree.

Brew all four through, one after another, at the same parameters. What they still hold in common at the seventh steep is the charcoal.